non-romance romance, #3: Bleak House and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
the court as grotesque body
This is the third issue in an ongoing series where I write about things that are not romance novels that I think romance novel readers might enjoy, with the genre as a lens. In the last iteration, I wrote about setting and consent choice in adaptations of A Day in the Country and A Room with a View.
Here, I’m looking at Bleak House by Charles Dickens and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed dir. Laura Poitras, and the theory of the grotesque, specifically as it relates to the way legal courts function in both works.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is about photographer Nan Goldin’s effort to organize the removal of the Sackler family names from art institutions, along with seeking justice for victims of opioid crisis. The Sackler family made the majority of their wealth as the owners of Purdue Pharma, the producer of Oxycontin, but for much of the past century, their legacy has been as art philanthropists, with the Sackler name being attached to wings of museums across the globe.
NARCAN is a narcotic overdose emergency treatment that anyone can be trained to administer. The Red Cross has virtual trainings you can do for a $20 fee, but many states have free trainings. I am attending a free virtual training next Wednesday sponsored by Pennsylvania. This training will also discreetly mail you a dose of NARCAN if you are in a situation where it would be hard to access NARCAN from a local pharmacy.
Also I wanted to direct you to my friend Sam’s writing in my friend’s Fran’s magazine (Fran Magazine). Sam’s essay is why I prioritized catching All the Beauty in the Bloodshed in theaters and not waiting for streaming.
This is the most far afield topic I’ve written about for this project so far. But my interest is the presence of justice in romance, whether that justice comes from courts or is extrajudicial. In both Bleak House and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, courts utterly fail to mete out justice, pushing themselves to the edge of farcical parodies of justice that are utterly unsatisfactory and available justice is found elsewhere.
cw: opioid addiction, suicide
I. the grotesque
[Grotesqueries] stand at a margin of consciousness between the known and the unknown, the perceived and the unperceived, calling into question the adequacy of our ways of organizing the world, of dividing the continuum of experience into knowable particles.
Geoffrey Galt Harpham, from On the Grotesque, 1982
The literary grotesque is a more expansive concept from the everyday adjective that we might use to describe something “comically or repulsively ugly.” The word comes from the Italian word “grottesca,” referring to the little figures found in ancient Roman decorative art in a building known at the time as le Grotte (the caves).
In the 20th century, two literary theorists developed grotesque studies in parallel: Wolfgang Kayser1 in his work The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1957) and Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World (1965). Kayser lands on a definition that focuses on deterioration of boundaries and order: “a world totally different from the familiar one—a world in which the realm of inanimate objects is no longer separated from those of plants, animals, and human beings, and where the law of statics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid.”2
Bakhtin’s main focus is on the concept of the carnivalesque and the grotesque body is a side definition that grows from his main thesis. “Exaggeration, hyperbolism, excessiveness are generally considered fundamental attributes of the grotesque style” and this manifests in extreme depictions of the body, particularly related to bodily functions.
Bakhtin focuses on the ways that the grotesque body is one that is in the “act of becoming,” reminding the viewer of the incompleteness of the human body (in the constant process of creating that reviled detritus). But importantly for Bakhtin, unlike Kayser, both the concept of carnivalesque and the grotesque triumphantly anti-hegemonic in their ability to call into questions systems of power. “[The grotesque] frees human consciousness, thought and imagination for new potentialities” because the act of becoming is one of regeneration and renewal.3
Geoffrey Galt Harpham in On the Grotesque (1982) the identifies the main contradiction between these two works: Kayser seems to “only understand [the grotesque’s] demonic powers, and none of its regenerative capacities…his recurrent adjectives for this world--sinister, nocturnal, abysmal, ominous, indicate his bias and his limitations.”4
Bakhtin, on the other hand, celebrates the collective power coming from carnival and the lowering of the abstract to the terms of the grotesque body, which reminds a viewer of both birth and death, simultaneously. According to Harpham, “by reading Bakhtin, we may be encouraged to feel that by embracing the grotesque we can regain fullness of meaning, purity of being, and natural innocence, lying breast to breast with the cosmos and with our fellow creatures.”5
Harpham’s solution to reconcile the denigration and the celebration is to define the grotesque once again in the in-between. The experience of a grotesque is dependent on the perception and the “perception of the grotesque is never a fixed or stable thing, but always a process, a progression.”6 Not only is the grotesque body a body in the act of becoming, but the grotesque status itself is not stagnant.
Bleak House and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed are both concerned with the becoming body, not exclusively in a reviled way, and certainly not in a condemning one. Bleak House feels like the grimiest of all the Dickens novels I have read, concerned with the dirt of the proximity that happens with urbanity springs up, but along with that dirt comes a universality of connection between the characters of the novel because of that proximity. Nan Goldin’s work, set in New York amongst her friends and community, also deals with the grime of humans in close proximity, but in a celebratory and loving way. Poitras’ film parallels Goldin’s photography of the 70s and 80s with her performance art and activist protests of the present, centered on groups pushed to the edges and othered by hegemonic capital.
Beyond the depicted bodies, both works also have a legal court that provides structure to the narrative, where humans are seeking remedy. And both courts become grotesque in their scale—gargantuan bodies of law, dealing with massive amounts of money that, somehow, seems to go nowhere, and leave a trail of paper and plaintiffs beyond, to the point where the human costs are what become the detritus of the grotesque court.
II. The High Court of Chancery
In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.
Charles Dickens, from the preface of Bleak House, 1853
Bleak House by Charles Dickens is ostensibly about the adjudication of a will. The probate case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce opens the novel and the anxiety of its resolution pushes its potential beneficiaries to act or encourages them to wait, creating the threads of the many subplots that fill Dickens’ third longest novel. But being beholden to the results of the will spells disaster for many of the characters of the book, who spend their lives waiting for an answer.
The book has two narrators: Esther Summerson and a third-person not-quite omniscient narrator. At first glance, it would seem that Esther’s singular perspective gives the subjective view, and the all-seeing, if not all-knowing, narrator, the objective one. But built into their functions are complicating factors. Esther is from whom we see the limited internal points of view of the cast of characters populating the book since those around her feel compelled to divulge intimacies to her. And the third-person narrator is really voyeuristically omniscient; he can plop down and report on the happenings in any room in England, but he struggles to jump inside someone’s head.
Adjudication at the center of a novel might suggest a setting to rights, or an implied order of things, but Jarndyce and Jarndyce provides the structure to the novel through its seemingly total disorder. The case has been going on for decades when the novel starts, with no clear end in sight. Bleak House is a book of devolvement, with movement toward chaos and the third person narrator seems to be especially susceptible to the confusion created by this entropy. This inability to look away from the grotesque manifestation of disorganization runs from the moment the novel opens on the labyrinthine case at the High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.
The High Court of Chancery is a court of equity. The goal of equity is allow for fair resolutions that the rigid law might not be able to deliver. “Equitable relief” might the most familiar concept to someone unfamiliar with the history of courts of equity. Equitable reliefs refers to results of a civil case that go beyond monetary damages. An example would be an injunction—a court order to prevent someone from doing something.
Since Jarndyce and Jarndyce is a probate case, dealing with a will, it is under the purview of a court of equity. Despite efforts to streamline the courts in Victorian era, there was a long backlog and Chancery had become a shorthand for condemning the inefficiency and the ineffectiveness for providing remedies of the courts at large.
The third person narrator also is in this “mud and mire” of the narrative stemming from the chaos of Jarndyce and Jarndyce since he reports what he witnesses in the present tense. He struggles to form narrative truth from the chaos in front of him.
What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had the distant ray of light upon him, when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of the world who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!
“Jarndyce and Jarydyce drones on”7 and the scale of time needed to resolve the will leads to a novel that is full of death of characters, and thus is full of aberrant, exaggerated and hyperbolic bodies. Every room feels cluttered, particularly Krook’s rag-and-bottle shop, which is the site of two of the most grotesque and abject images in the novel: Krook’s collection of human hair for wigs (hair is common material for art that concerns the abject, beautiful when attached to a head, creepy the moment it is removed) and Krook’s especially grotesque death by spontaneous combustion.
With a ridiculous and seemingly unending probate case at the center, Bleak House has a macabre humor that focuses on waste and death of the case. The narrator explains: “Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into joke. That is the only good that has ever come from it. It has been a death to many, but it is a joke in that profession.” The joke is in blaspheming the legal institution, so ineffective that a probate case uses up its own body, the materials that it is litigating, making the only demonstrative result of Jarndyce and Jarndyce its byproducts: anguish and anxiety, death and bodies.
When Jarndyce and Jarndyce is finally actually resolved, the joke extends beyond the legal profession to include the whole courtroom:
We asked a gentleman by us, if he knew what cause was on? He told us Jarndyce and Jarndyce. We asked him if he knew what was doing in it? He said, really no he did not, nobody ever did; but as well as he could make out, it was over.
"Over for the day?" we asked him. "No", he said; "over for good."
Over for good!
When we heard this unaccountable answer, we looked at one another quite lost in amazement. Could it be possible that the Will had set things right at last, and that Richard and Ada were going to be rich? It seemed too good to be true. Alas, it was!
Our suspense was short; for a break up soon took place in the crowd, and the people came streaming out looking flushed and hot, and bringing a quantity of bad air with them. Still they were all exceedingly amused, and were more like people coming out from a Farce or a Juggler than from a court of Justice. We stood aside, watching for any countenance we knew; and presently great bundles of paper began to be carried out—bundles in bags, bundles too large to be got into any bags, immense masses of papers of all shapes and no shapes, which the bearers staggered under, and threw down for the time being, anyhow, on the Hall pavement, while they went back to bring out more. Even these clerks were laughing. We glanced at the papers, and seeing Jarndyce and Jarndyce everywhere, asked an official-looking person who was standing in the midst of them, whether the cause was over. "Yes," he said; "it was all up with it at last!" and burst out laughing too. ...
"Mr. Kenge," said Allan, appearing enlightened all in a moment. "Excuse me, our time presses. Do I understand that the whole estate is found to have been absorbed in costs?"
"Hem! I believe so," returned Mr. Kenge. "Mr. Vholes, what do you say?"
"I believe so," said Mr. Vholes.
"And that thus the suit lapses and melts away?"
"Probably," returned Mr. Kenge. "Mr. Vholes?"
"Probably," said Mr. Vholes.
The entropic ouroboros of the court case has finally eaten itself and its abject detritus is expelled from the courtroom because there are no resources to consume left. So the court laughs.
III. United States Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York
It takes nerve to walk down the street when you fall between the cracks.
Nan Goldin, from The Other Side, 1993
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (dir. Laura Poitras, 2022) is an Oscar-nominated documentary about Nan Goldin. From the late 70s onward, Goldin photographed queer life in New York, documenting her community’s joy and pain in equal measure. By the middle of the 1990s, many of her subjects and friends had passed away from AIDS or drug overdose.
Goldin’s photography is transitory and effervescent, and especially looking at it now, filled with loss.
Goldin’s work and her focus on her community that is pushed to the fringe by the hegemony could be viewed through the lens of Bakhtin’s celebratory and joyful carnivalesque grotesque that threatens power and oppressive order.
Goldin herself is a recovering opioid addict. Goldin used heroin in the 80s and was prescribed OxyContin in 2014 after a surgery on her wrist. In 2018, Goldin published a work in ArtForum called “I Survived the Opioid Crisis.” She writes about discovering that the Sackler Family, longstanding philanthropists whose names were on the buildings where Goldin’s art is displayed, made their money from Oxycontin.
Goldin expresses her desire to make the “personal political” again, directly referencing the activism of ACT UP, and announces the formation of her group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). One of P.A.I.N.'s goals was to pressure museums around the world to remove the Sackler name from the buildings, to end the art world’s enabling of the family whitewashing their legacy.
In the documentary itself, there are two parallel threads: Nan and Community Then (seen through archival documentation and Goldin’s own art and voiceover) and Nan and Community Now (seen through new documentary footage shot by Poitras and talking head interviews). Goldin’s work with P.A.I.N. is the focus of the present-day portions of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, while the retrospective portions look back at Goldin’s early family life and her photographic career.
Like Bleak House, one of the centers of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an impotent court, marked by detritus and inaction. Chancery Court of Victorian London makes way for the bankruptcy court of the Southern District of New York. Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of Oxycontin, owned by members of the Sackler family filed bankruptcy in September 2019. The Sacklers personal wealth is not directly tied to this company anymore, and there remains a question of how the bankruptcy settlements will affect the Sackler family’s personal worth.
In a 2021 interview with New York Magazine, Nan Goldin was asked “Do you feel as though survivors have been heard adequately throughout this process?” and she responded:
No, not at all. The creditors are going to get a very small amount of money, and only in the cases where they had actual prescription for OxyContin from Purdue, and thousands of the creditors did not have that because the streets were flooded with Oxy. So a lot of people got addicted from the street supplies. The amount of money that’s going to victims is like 3,000 to about 40,000. It’s not enough for a funeral for many of these people’s loved ones.
No, the people will never be heard. That’s why our Ad Hoc Committee entered the court, and we’ve testified in Congress. There’s been all these congressional hearings about the Sacklers, but nothing seems to move the judge.
In one of the last segments of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Goldin and P.A.I.N. activists address the Sacklers during what amounts to a post-settlement, non-evidentiary hearing, with little legal bearing on the potential settlement. Extraordinary procedure in a bankruptcy court, not normally characterized by victims. Three members of the Sackler family are required to listen as Goldin and others recount how the opioid crisis has affected them, including a mother playing a 911 call recording of her child dying. The Sacklers appear unmoved by any of the testimony.
The settlement reached between the states party to the suit and Purdue Pharma, leading up to the testimony in the film, includes $6 billion of Sackler money going to address primarily future harms of the opioid crisis, rather than to past victims and the Sackler family would be personally immune from future civil litigation.
Though the settlement was reached almost a year ago, approval is still pending and it is coming down to procedure. The Southern District of New York court held that “the Bankruptcy Court lacked constitutional authority to enter a final order approving the non-consensual releases, even though they were incorporated into proposed plan.” In re Purdue Pharma, L.P., 635 B.R. 26 (S.D.N.Y. 2021).
The non-consensual releases refer to the releases from civil liability for the Sackler family members. The appeal that led to this holding was interlocutory, meaning that the underlying bankruptcy case continued, leading to the $6 billion settlement in March 2022, even as the Sackler family then appealed the S.D.N.Y holding.
Now the bankruptcy is pending based on this Second Circuit appeal. Though the releases would provide civil immunity for the Sackler family, they do not extend to criminal immunity. But the Department of Justice has not indicated any intention to file charges against the Sackler family.
In re: Purdue Pharma drones on.
IV. available justice
Esther and her past tense have the boon of retrospection when it comes to forming an understanding of narrative out of the chaos of Bleak House. And Esther, though she might gracefully protest being the center of anything, is the fulcrum of the story. She is close with the potential beneficiaries of the wills and the question of her hidden true parentage is central to many of the mysteries of Bleak House. Esther’s limited knowledge actually provides more order than the omniscient’s narrator’s access to the entirety of relevant happenings.
But dual structure of Bleak House moves the action away from Esther’s knowledge base, present or past, for half the book. Any character you meet, no matter how minor they are, feels like a potential source of the unifying coincidences that propel the narrative forward, especially in the third-person’s narrator’s present tense telling.
The reliance on coincidence and unrealistic narrative neatness is an accusation leveled against Dickens. But the coincidences are a form of Christian Divine Justice and catharsis from harm, even if they seem a little neat to a reader. The same form of justice that allows Sydney Carton to change places with Charles Darnay or the Brownlows to notice Oliver Twist comes down from on high to string the cast of characters together in Bleak House and set them as much to rights as possible, and promises the redemption of heaven to those who are unable to be reconciled by coincidence on earth.
A smile irradiated his face as she bent to kiss him. He slowly laid his face down upon her bosom, drew his arms closer round her neck, and with one parting sob began the world. Not this world, oh, not this! The world that sets this right.
Redemption in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed looks neither to heaven or court for its setting.
P.A.I.N. members take part in harm reduction training, including NARCAN administration. The group also donates a drug tester to the harm reduction center, so that users can more safely consume without fear of overdose.
There’s an archival footage scene of Goldin’s parents in their old age talking about their eldest daughter, Barbara, who died by suicide when Nan was 11, and her relationship with Nan. Goldin’s ability to ask her parents about her sister, after years of obfuscation around her sister’s death and queer identity, and film it for herself, felt individually restorative to Goldin.
And lastly is when Goldin and other P.A.I.N. activists are able to go to the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In what was previously known as the Sackler Wing, the Temple of Dendur is one of the most iconic visual spaces in the Met—the setting of Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) doing “waiter, that is too much pepper on my paprikash” and where celebrities and fashion designer eat dinner during the Met Gala. The room was also the site of one of P.A.I.N’s demonstrations: they dumped empty pill bottles into the reflecting pool that surrounds the Temple. In the film, the activists look up at a now unlabeled window above the door to the room that houses the Temple and embrace each other.
As Goldin points out in the film, removing the name does not actually help the opioid crisis directly, but it is an action that was available to her and her community now. Resources like trainings for NARCAN administration is what actually saves people’s lives, but removing the names is a step of accountability and the process has involved a public reckoning of the Sacklers’ legacy, unavailable in a court of law thus far.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed will be available to stream on HBOMax on March 19.
Kayser, a German academic, had known
Nazi sympathies, so it is perhaps not a surprise that he can only think of things on the edges in terms of the sinister.
Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature 21 (1957).
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World 49 (1965).
Geoffrey Harpham, On the Grotesque 71 (1982).
Id., 72
Id., 14
“Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit.”